The Rewards of Listening To Complex and Challenging Music - Joanna Newsom, Fiery Furnaces, World's End Girlfriend

Do you like to be challenged by the music you listen to?

Personally, I love music that can be a little "difficult" to listen to at first, but then rewards repeated listening with grander and grander riches.

Do you understand what I'm talking about?

I don't mean that the music has to be dissonant or unpleasant - although harshness and dissonance can certainly be tools that evoke powerful emotional response to music. (Igorrr and Diamanda Galas, who I've covered previously, certainly use these tools.)

And I don't necessarily mean music that is unusually minimal, repetitive, or trance-inducing. That stuff has it's place too, but you can usually "get" what it's trying to convey with a single listen.

Today, I'm thinking more about music that's got a lot of layers to it, from instrumentation to lyrics (if it has lyrics). As a result, you can listen to it hundreds of times, and still extract a new sense of meaning and understanding from the next listen. And the more familiar you get with the track, the more intense your emotional reaction becomes.

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I'd like to share three very different projects with you that illustrate what I'm talking about.

Joanna Newsom may be the most approachable example. Her music is harmonious. She uses traditional instrumentation. (She's primarily a harpist.) Her voice has a unique twang and lilt to it. She's by no means mainstream. But still, on the surface, she's a pleasure to listen to.

Here's a live acoustic performance of her "Monkey and Bear."

I love the antique instruments here, the blend of medieval choral sound with more modern percussion, and the way that Joanna, rather than trying to hide the "imperfections" of her unique voice, instead pushes it to the limits, exploring what makes it unique. What a refreshing change, in a world of auto-tuned, over-processed pop!

What really loads this song with replay-ability and meaning is the lyrics. On the surface, it's a story about two escaped circus animals trying to make a new life in the countryside. But if you listen again, and follow along with the lyrics (you can do that here) you'll hear things about the compromises we must make to survive, and the way we change with experience and time, and the real meaning of our identities.

The lyrics of Monkey and Bear deserve to be known for their poetry alone. But combined with her musicianship and scoring, this becomes a song you can listen to again and again with increased pleasure. It's a sort-of hymn you can internalize and carry with you for the rest of your life.

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It's hard for me to think of a band that show more pure joy and fun in their performances than The Fiery Furnaces. This brother and sister pair play a blend of funk, rock, and blues which is un-classifiable. The songs shift from one style and vibe to another without warning. Key changes, tempo changes, mood changes - don't get too comfortable!

Their tracks can be off-putting or disconcerting to the casual listener. But again, this is part of what makes them so engaging.

Unlike Newsom's lyrics, their seem arbitrary, even silly at times. There are sections where the stories they're trying to tell seem to get away from them, and they have to fit in more words than the music seems ready to support. And yet in doing so they capture a slice-of-life immediacy that seems especially, elegantly true to modern experience.

Again, after a few listens, your mind is ready for the shifts and changes. You find yourself looking forward to them with pleasure and anticipation, and noticing things you hadn't noticed before.

I'll embed the video for "Navy Nurse," because it makes a bassy, funky contrast to Newsom's video. It's full of energy, and it shows so much of what I love about them in just six minutes.

When you have time to listen to a whole album, (and you can really sit down and listen to it), track down Rehearsing My Choir. This album tells the life story of their grandmother from her young adulthood in Chicago, through her marriage and into old age. And they recorded it with their grandmother, whose voice can be heard on most of the tracks. It's a moving tribute, a set of linked musical stories with some of the most unique instrumentation on any album I've ever heard.

The first time I heard Rehearsing My Choir, I had no idea what I was listening to. But something about its energy, and the mysterious power of the lyrics, kept me coming back. On each repeat the story came through a little more clearly, so that now I feel as though I know their grandmother intimately, across all of her decades, in a way we humans rarely get to experience the life of another.

(Seriously, it's one of my favorite albums of all time. It's criminally under-rated. All of the tracks are available on Youtube, starting with this one. And this page at genius.com provides the tracklist and lyrics.)

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I'll close with a mostly-instrumental track by the Japanese group World's End Girlfriend. It's "All Imperfect Love Song" from the album Dream's End Come True.

This is the sort of track you can listen to in the background or attend to closely. Either approach will provide its own rewards. It blends haunting classical strings with percussion and electronica, jazz, grunge, a bit of spoken word Japanese, and noise.

It terms of outright sound, it's probably the richest example I've provided today. It's a fairly long track, at 25 minutes, so feel free to jump around if I've already overtaxed your time. But I think you'll be rewarded if you bookmark it for later and come back to it on occasion. It was a regular part of my commute for several months.

What really captures me about this piece is the way it captures the passage of time and represents a life's worth of emotional experience. And it does this without any words that I can understand.

Musical themes and motifs weave through it, all stitched securely in place by the sort of electronic ticking you can hear at the 13:25 mark. Despite the length of the track, you get the sense that time is running out. There's an urgency there, and pleasant memory peppered with regret, and periods of silliness, celebration and hope. There's ASMR type spine-tingling clicks and whispers, wrapped in the sort of large scale emotional arc you'd expect from a classical symphony.

It was no surprise to discover that Katsuhiko Maeda, the creator of this project, studied as a classical musician.

Again, I was a little put off by that track at first. But now I find I can't make it to the end without having a full-blown emotional reaction.

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So how about you?

What sort of experience do you come to music for? And do you find you experience it more intensely from music that's not necessarily easy to listen to, but gets better and better the more you hear it?

Any favorites or recommendations for me?